Ghost Apples

By Ian D. Hall

Perchester, Oxfordshire is a town with secrets kept hidden for the sake of all who live there, a safe place where you can be sure your children will grow up with certain attitudes, mindful of the inheritance granted them. It has always been that way.

Secrets, though, have a way of coming out of the mist, of disturbing the balance of nature. When some of the town’s teenage population see a figure in that closing mist – when what they see drives them out of their minds – the nearby facility at Wendlefields becomes a staging post in a war between good and evil; between nature and nurture.

For jaded local journalist Simon Kinsey, it is a war that will see him pushed to his limit as he discovers his hometown is not all it seems and that the past very much plays a part in the present, from which the legend of Ghost Apples is born.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beaten Track Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786454836

Ian D. Hall

Having been found on a 'Co-op' shelf in Stirchley, Birmingham by a Cornish woman and a man of dubious footballing taste, Ian grew up in neighbouring Selly Park and Bicester in Oxfordshire. After travelling far and wide, he now considers Liverpool to be his home.Ian was educated at Moor Green School, Bicester Senior School, and the University of Liverpool, where he gained a 2:1 (BA Hons) in English Literature.He now reviews and publishes daily on the music, theatre and culture within Merseyside.

Book preview

Chapter One

Tom had fallen out with his father once again. It was a weekly ritual to which he had become accustomed; perhaps in some small way even enjoyed. By the end of a tough week of square bashing the latest recruits into shape, dressing them down on the parade ground, his top lip still vibrating long after the order for right wheel and left turn had been routinely—he would say wilfully—ignored, Tom’s father would bring it home to what remained of the family and start on them, barking orders, making demands, and they would swiftly comply, no questions asked.

Tom’s mother had lasted longer in the parade ground of the civilian than either could have imagined, both father and son distraught in their own particular way that she had died suddenly one autumn evening whilst taking the family dogs out for a walk, the mist crouching low upon the river that ran through the fields and woods at the back of their home on the very outskirts of the town, a natural border which provided a sense of safety from the demands of the city, of being kept away from the rigours of life in the army camp.

Cathy Solden’s heart had given out, quickly, painlessly—so said the official documents, which had described the autopsy in a cold but meticulous manner—a procedure of which Tom’s father would surely have approved, had the two ever spoken about it. Instead, it was left hanging as a permanent thread, which the fifteen-year-old boy had begun too habitually pull on, grasping at the only memory the two men shared that didn’t have at its base the spectre of discipline.

Tom drew a futile drag on his rolled-up cigarette and took stock off his now familiar surroundings. When his father’s patience had been tested to the limit, when the rigours of Her Majesty’s Army had played its part on his health and mental frailties, Tom would escape to the painted-once-yearly shed, which stood proud against the onslaught of summer heat and winter woes, and succumb to his own form of relief: the pain medication had gone some way towards wiping clean the image of his mother’s face with the water of his mind.

Over the last three years, Tom had turned the shed into a second bedroom. He had moved out the machinery, the power tools, the saw, the hammers and various sizes of nails and bolts; the grass trimmer had been placed under the stairs and only came out when William Solden barked his August orders to tidy the garden. The shed was a small island of defiance, an area of non-cooperation in a world of rigid format and dug-deep emotions. Here, Tom was king: the posters on the wall served to remind him of the outside world, the bands whose music he enjoyed, the female pin-ups of cinema he would never meet but to whom he had taken on the role of leading man in every story his imagination conjured as the weekend passed in a cloud of smoke and long, lost hours.

It started to rain, the gentle sound of Oxfordshire drizzle splattering against the one window to reality that the shed provided, facing the back door of the house, where his father was no doubt wrapped up in some new scheme to get Tom to buckle down in preparation for when he turned sixteen and was sent away to join the army whether he liked it or not.

Another drag. Finally, the meagre amount of local brew hit Tom’s system. Supine on the camp bed, he watched the rain explode against the pane of glass. Like the black-and-white aerial pictures he had once seen in a World War Two book, the spatter of dots appeared haphazard at first, but soon, a detailed image of destruction emerged, the increasingly rapid explosions, a chain reaction of everything in the blast radius: gas stations sent fire into the sky, searing the clouds hanging innocently over the scene; people ran in terror as the fire consumed house after house, street after street.

Tom’s gaze drifted to one of the posters—larger than the rest and bought from a record shop in Oxford rather than hastily torn from a magazine—and the scowling, earnest faces of the khaki-painted soldier and the red-robed creature he assumed was the artist’s version of Death as they discussed the card held up for the onlooker to see.

Not joining the army, Tom muttered, a sincere rehearsal of the laying-down of the law he would, come his sixteenth birthday, deliver in person to his father, and for which he suffer the consequences, most likely being told to leave the house. That was all right; he wasn’t really invested in it anymore since his mother died.

The urge to drown out the world with music that nobody else could hear was one his father’s generation didn’t understand, but to the alienated boys and girls in this small town, it had become a place of safety. He groped the stone floor for his Walkman and then for a tape, any tape, that would take him further from this place. His fingers grazed the plastic edge of a case but succeeded only in knocking it out of reach. He redoubled his efforts and grasped the cassette firmly, a small victory dance playing out in his mind. When the rain comes and you have no place in the world, every little victory counts.

He hadn’t noticed the daylight outside diminish—the effects of the joint and his complete obliviousness to the world beyond the rain-shaped scorch marks on the shed’s solitary window. With a flick of a switch, the bulb above flared like a calling card to the heavens, to which he was not immune, hurting his eyes and making him squint.

This was not new: all bright light hurt his eyes and had done so for several years. A doctor told him there was nothing to worry about, while his father told him to get a grip and stop making excuses, be a man. For Tom, it was little more than the inconvenience of having to wear sunglasses when he was lying down listening to music. Sliding them into place, he studied the tape he had salvaged from the floor and gave it a nod of approval—a classic of Americana, loaned to him by Keith Screpple, an army brat like himself, who along with his family, had been shipped back home to New Jersey after he got in trouble with the town’s police for setting off a quantity of high-grade fireworks in one of the main drains that took the overflow of rain down to the river.

These days, any album Tom picked up spoke to him in ways that none of his peers could understand. The girls, for the most part, were divided in their opinions of the aesthetics of Culture Club, Wham! or any other act that came their way, titillating their growing curiosity of sex and evoking shrieks of laughter, chatter and gossip about boys—behaviour oddly out of step with the demands of the era to look cool, to dress smart and be seen. There were a couple of exceptions. Lorna, who was into rock music, didn’t really give a damn about the clique and was like himself—an outcast in the eyes of the Dangerously Groovy. Lorna would come around sometimes, but only when Tom’s father wasn’t there to kill the vibe. It was thanks to Lorna that Tom had his limited stash of dope.

Then there was Heather, a girl for whom he would have given up every leading role to be her supporting co-star, but who saw him as a mess, an out-of-control creature she only gave the time of day as he was less dangerous than the preening, domineering lads in their school year—boys on parade all jostling for her attention. They stood no chance. Tom’s cassette tapes came from Heather, bought from the stores by her dad, a regular guy who steered clear of William Solden, afraid he, too, would end up a casualty in the army man’s private war.

How much grass did he have left? Enough for one more smoke?

A noise from outside the shed, slithery, the sound of wet leather being thrown in a raging fire.

The noise had been loud enough to overpower the music on his Walkman, and he took off his earphones, imagination running riot. He looked out of the window, but a mist had enveloped the shed, shrouding the darkness of the approaching night.

Tom was not given to being alarmed by the sudden and unexplained. Many years of coming to understand his father had taken their toll on his stoic psyche, but something inside him took notice of the sense of unease, the possible distress. Burglars perhaps? It wasn’t unknown, although they tended to keep away from this side of town as a rule. Too many police officers lived in these streets and closes, which backed onto the fields. Perhaps it was foxes sniffing around the leftovers that inevitably found their way to the ground once the neighbour’s cat had ripped open a bin bag.

Another sound. The mist tapped against the glass, pushed by the wind that stirred in apprehension.

Tom rose and walked stealthily to the side of the window and peeked out, not wishing to confront head-on whatever was out there. The lock on the door rattled. Maybe his dad had finally had enough of his son’s weekend retreat into stoner life and had come to drag him back into the house to deliver his ultimatum. Stand up straight, turn left, wheel right, stand at ease, stand to attention and repeat forever.

Straining his neck to take in the window’s narrow field of vision, he saw a light, a dark glow, grubby, insistent, not enough to hurt his eyes but enough to squint as if he were concentrating on a mock exam in school. Inside the light, he saw the silhouette of a man dressed in a suit and top hat, a walking cane in his left hand—not for aiding in the act of walking it seemed. Tom squinted harder, the man’s face coming into focus, followed by a wave of revulsion at the sickly yellow hue of his skin and black eyes that stared towards the house and threatened to pull Tom into their darkness. Breaking away, he looked towards the wide-open back door. His father must have fallen asleep without locking up.

Tom turned his attention back to the yellow-faced man, noticing now that the colour was in streaks, as if the creature had undergone treatment for jaundice that had somehow made it worse. His hands, large and ungainly, reached out, fingers knotted, riddled with bumps. His fingernails, though tinged with the same yellow as his features, were transparent, long and pointed, almost flimsy.

The man walked towards the house, the mist following him as if by command, then suddenly looked back at the shed, and Tom experienced the same kind of apprehension he’d felt when one of the dogs had come back from their walk alone, brown lead trailing in the mud.

Tom started banging his hand against the window. He was afraid. The figure grinned and placed one knotted, bony finger over its cracked mouth, quietly shushing Tom’s shouts of alarm.

The shed was locked, the key still in the hole, as it made it harder for his father to burst in and witness his son’s fall from potential soldier to the unwashed layabout. But it was of no consequence; the figure had turned away, back towards the house.

The mist closed up tight around the dark light, reminding Tom of a coal miner’s torch when the air was thick with gases and impending disaster. Tom scrabbled to unlock the door. He may have spent the day goading his father about his mother’s death and the US airbase up the road, the nuclear weapons the Americans had buried under the soil ready to unleash their terrible fallout and plague across civilisation, but he cared for his dad, albeit in the small chunks between being constantly drilled about his future.

The man entered the house, and a few seconds later, Tom heard a scream that turned him cold. He let go of the key and let his arm fall to his side, defeated, unsure what to do. A minute later, the man walked out of the house and strode towards the shed, momentarily out of sight before appearing at the window. He looked directly into Tom’s eyes and held up a key. It was the key to the shed. The figure smiled and bowed down. Tom edged closer, watching the figure put the key on the grass, out of reach, and then slowly raise itself up to its full height. It pressed its face against the glass pane, and Tom sprang back, the hairs on his arms, which had only started showing the previous summer, standing to attention, his heart pounding a double-quick march. The figure repeated the gesture of silence, the finger raised slowly and with solemnity to the grinning mouth.

Then the mist cleared and the figure was gone, vanished into the darkness as if a figment of Tom’s imagination, a nightmare brought on by the weed. Even as he was convincing himself that was what had happened, he heard the distant sound of sirens blaring, waking up the night and bringing reality crashing down upon his life. He staggered backwards, topping onto his makeshift bed, and screamed for help.

Chapter Two

Most people in the town only heard about the bombing raid over North Africa later in the day, but Cheryl Frampton had watched in youthful wonder, a mixture of bravado and fear for the unknown reprisal that might visited upon the area she lived in. The papers tomorrow would be full of jingoism, rabid hostility and perhaps in some quarters a measure of caution and dismay that the Americans sought to strike and use the English countryside as the base from which war could be launched. However, for now, the press was its usual mix of titillation, football, gossip and the occasional note of sincerity.

Cheryl gripped her overladen orange newspaper-round bag as she counted the planes taking off in the distance. The death of Simone de Beauvoir hadn’t hit the British press to any great extent; the fallout of the allegations of Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past was rumbling on; the speculation of the Trans World Airlines flight bombing a few days before was levelling out; Chernobyl was but a place so distant in the mind that it would not register upon the young girl’s imagination until a week after the explosion. Still, she counted the airplanes out and watched them fly overhead.

With the planes speeding their way to Libya airspace, Cheryl resumed her morning paper round. Not much further to go; enough time to stop and throw some stones into the river that ran through the woods; enough time to dream of hot, buttered crumpets for breakfast and to think of a way to avoid the selection of the school sports day teams later in the week. Five more houses: the groundkeeper’s cottage guarding the entrance to the old estate which bore the name of the town would be the first of them, and it would see her paper bag almost take on the vacuum of space, as the vast majority of the daily papers would be dropped off there. Collectively, they weighed a tonne, but it was worth it. The Christmas tip that came Cheryl’s way had kept her afloat for the last three years, had kept her from asking money she knew her mother didn’t have, not since her dad had skipped town in search of adventure when she was nine.

Cheryl’s mother had been against her taking up such a job. Not for girls, she kept muttering; not the early mornings, not with the route being so far from home. Cheryl had played for time, grinding down her mother’s fears with subtlety and care, even asking her to come with her for the first two weeks. Soon after, her mother relented when she worked out for herself that it meant the limited amount of money coming into the house would be eased, and her daughter was being responsible for her own actions; the extra five pounds a week towards the housekeeping was also a factor.

Cheryl had worked hard, the morning route and the local paper run in the evenings after school, the odd additional route here and there when it was snowing and other delivery boys and girls could not be bothered to leave the comfort of their beds, or when the day was too nice and too hot to be lumping around a bag stuffed full of newspapers over a three-mile route. And then, of course, were the little extras: the advertising sheets of paper, the allure of country living promised by attaching a conservatory to the house, the local shops that lined the town’s small high street spreading their wares across flimsy sheets of paper—special offers and money-off vouchers. Every one of those which Cheryl delivered meant more money and was a step closer to the future she wanted, now only a few thousand deliveries away.

Cheryl had few friends. It didn’t matter to her really. Analytical at a young age, she seemed to alienate people quite quickly, her manner off-putting to those in her age group, who could not handle the intensity of her beliefs, of not choosing to go to Oxford on a Saturday with the other girls and watch the boys play on the video games at the arcade, laughing and giggling, making hopeless advances and attempts at small talk, which always led to the boy to assume the girl in question liked them. None of that appealed to Cheryl; she wanted out of the town at the first opportunity, to see the world, so she skipped any social activity that was proposed, avoided contact with her peers and just walked the route and put the money away.

As she came upon the shortcut she always took through the woods, cutting a good fifteen minutes off her round, she thought she heard a sound, a deep snorting, and sensed something animalistic, restless and buoyed up by the airplanes that had disturbed its sleep and turned its head to thoughts of food.

Cheryl gave it little heed. Soon forgotten, it was a moment, like so many others, that in her plans meant nothing. She wandered on, not noticing the mist that started to rise up around her feet, the small tendrils of vapour clawing at her jeans, then the tights, and nibbling down on her ankles.

The river, more like a wide rushing brook as far as Cheryl was concerned, had been a source of entertainment for children and adults alike for centuries. The wooden bridge that spanned the water was often neglected in favour of the rush of water further upstream, which gushed from a height of six feet and was often greeted with squeals of delight or good-natured curses issued in exasperation when someone pushed their friend into the deeper water, soaking them to the bone. Ever logical, Cheryl didn’t wade through the water, especially when she was carrying her papers. One misstep on a slippery wet stone would send her over, and her papers would be carried downstream, the news melding together in a ball of ink and type, photographs of the guilty obscured by the unrelenting torrent.

Cheryl crossed the bridge, an old tale of trolls floating up from childhood fears quickly suppressed. She stopped halfway and admired the blossoms on the trees; April was her favourite time of year, showing its youthful valour once more, its resilience to renew in the face of winter’s forceful, fierce tirade. Picking up a small broken twig from the wooden planks beneath her feet, she made a wish, dropped it over one side of the bridge, then walked to the other and watched the twig float serenely onwards. Her wish was always the same; part of her understood that it might never come true.

That sound again. Close, heavy, and for the first time, she noticed the mist which dragged at her heels as traversed the woods. Her mother had once told her of a series of phone calls she had taken during the night, the heavy breathing coming down the complexity of wires, the unknown and unseen unsettling her, making her anxious, ultimately terrifying her when the person on the line finally spoke her name. Not long after that, her mother unplugged the telephone and advised the phone company that she no longer wanted to have one in the house.

The mist crept forward, slithering to the edge of the bridge, where it sank to the water’s edge and rose up like a wall, leaving only the bridge clear, the early morning sun beating down with spring elegance upon the stretch of wood upon which Cheryl was standing, her eyes on stalks as the mist turned yellow and the chill of the air made her shiver.

She watched the gloom surround her, the mist glistening and pulsating with life. She was unsure whether the sound of heavy breathing was hers or came from inside the mist itself. The air seemed to vibrate, to quiver as if agitated by its inability to push aside the yellowing mist that encompassed all aspects of the bridge besides the space above Cheryl’s head.

For a brief moment, she thought she heard a voice ask for permission to approach, the spoken fumble of a teenage boy asking for a dance and already prepared for the inevitable pain of rejection. She dismissed the thought immediately. Not logical, there’s nothing there, just a freak weather episode, just my mind telling me I’ve worked too hard and this is payback for the neglect of sleep.

She fought hard, but her inner argument had no conviction, the matters of fact which had served her so well over the years, the consistent analytical thought that other girls shied away from, and which kept Cheryl alone, suddenly deserted her. Under the bridge, the troll lurked and ate the goats that dared to cross.

On the riverbank Cheryl had left behind, the mist parted slightly, a gap through which the trees revealed themselves again, sparkling with fruitful spring joy, and a moment of relief swept over her. Surely, this aberration of weather was coming to an end. But then the mist closed up again, the work of a skilled seamstress stitching together the tear in double quick time and with no sign of the mend, an invisible seam. In its place stood a tall figure, long fingers extending from large, grotesque hands which hung at the end of impossibly long arms. It raised one of its hands to its mouth and placed a finger over the grinning lips.

It was the act of being shushed that drove Cheryl to the brink, sullying the purity of logic that life was not a random progression to which others of her age were slaves. It was routine, predictable…and it all came tumbling down around her as she started to scream. She was still screaming later that evening when the search party, organised by the manor house’s groundskeeper and her mother, found her close to the field which backed onto Tom Solden’s house. Whatever had transpired left both children in a state of nervous exhaustion, screaming their heads off in terror and talking incoherently of a manmade of mist.

Chapter Three

There was very little incentive to being the editor of the town’s newspaper. It certainly didn’t come with the prestige Sam McCarthy thought she deserved—the kind of prestige that was available if she were to jump ship and take one of the offers that came her way whenever she was in touch with the newspaper’s owner. Those offers wouldn’t be around forever; sooner or later, the paper would shut down, leaving this backwater’s only means of keeping up with local events to the girls’ Saturday afternoon tearoom gossip. In truth, most of the gossip was centred on the local ‘tycoon’, who owned two farms and made a habit of driving his new car down the high street with the windows down for everyone to marvel at the way he wore his driving gloves.

Posh, arrogant idiot. One day, I’ll start a petition to have the main road turned into a pedestrian area ‘for the benefit of the local people’ so I don’t have to see his smug, round face passing my office window every couple of hours.

Sam sat back in her chair. Time dragged towards the end of the day, so close to being able to leave and get back to being on-call at home. She was never truly off the job, though, equally, she never had to wish for a dull moment because it was all dull. Any stories of monumental interest were covered by the tabloids and the broadsheets—

Air attack on Libya, a tactical blunder or retaliation for Berlin discotheque bombing?

While it had been made clear to Sam in a terse interview with some low-ranking official that the main bulk of the aircraft had been sent from RAF Lakenheath, it was well known the support had come from just a few miles away, that the town had its own angle on the story, yet she could not see it go to print.

The boss had warned her off. The scene she wanted to create was too explosive, volatile, he said. She would get her turn, but for now, she had to step away from the story, act